The overall traffic admob handled was 14.1b up from 6.6b a year ago. (114% growth)

Smartphones generated 6.78b impressions in February, up from 2.3b a year ago. (193% growth). The iPhone OS generated 3.4b impressions.

Feature phones generated 4.9b, up from 3.5b (43% growth)

Although it’s dangerous to equate “usage” to these impression numbers, the overall trend is that most of the growth is happening on smartphones. Of those, the iPhone OS and Android are taking 75% share of eyeballs, at least on Admob’s network.

The iPhone platform generated as many impressions in February as all feature phones generated a year ago. It does not seem a stretch to predict that iPhone will overtake all feature phones in overall impressions in the near future.

More interesting stats from Business Pulse survey by the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal that was conducted between March 16 and March 23:

9% plan to buy right away

23% said they expect to buy but can wait (total of 32% plan on purchase)

Additional survey data from comScore:

65% awareness

1% of those aware already ordered the iPad

15% of those aware plan to buy within 3 months

Another from Sybase and conducted by Zogby International surveyed 2,443 adults with a mobile phone, 770 of which own smartphones. Among the smartphone-owning respondents, more than half — 52.3 percent — said they are most likely to use a tablet device like the iPad to do work

Apple’s App Store has grabbed 5 percent of the roughly $10 billion a year U.S. gaming industry, with revenue for games increasing from $115 million in 2008 to $500 million from 2008 and 2009, according to a new report from Flurry Analytics, which helps mobile application developers make money.

Palm announced 2k apps on their store and Google recently crossed over 30k. Blackberry has 5k. Ovi maintains about 7k apps.

According to Appshopper there are 199,885 apps approved and 172,662 available on the App Store. (200k will certainly be crossed today March 21st). Due to churn and policy enforcement Apple has removed 27,223 apps from its store over the years.

In the case of Android, policing may not amount to much catalog erosion so the 30k figure is more comparable to the “approved” Apple figure.

With 27th the deadline for inclusion by the April 3rd launch date, the rush to submit new apps for the iPad is on. No doubt, there will be a significant surge in new apps in March. This might lead to a new record of over 25k apps added in one month.

My initial estimate in February for the 200k milestone was by May 1st. I was clearly off by nearly 40 days. If the add rate is maintained at 20k/mo 300k will come around in August although I’m not as confident in this forecast. The rate of app addition seems to be accelerating.

Palm CEO “I’ve never used an iPhone” Rubinstein quoted in the earnings conference call:

“We had an arrangement with Sprint that when we launched with Sprint that they would invest in marketing and carry the product and for that they would get an exclusive for a period of time. That really determined when we could do our launch at Verizon. I agree with your premise that if we could have launched at Verizon earlier, prior to Droid, that we would have gotten the attention that the Droid got and since I believe that we have a better product, I think we would have even done better.”

So we are led to believe Droid launched into a window in Verizon’s launch schedule. A window which was shut to Palm due to their exclusive with Sprint. It’s a matter of timing.

Then again, Droid got $100 million in advertising and marketing budget from Verizon and Motorola. It’s unlikely that Palm could leverage that kind of muscle, and their product ended up being positioned on a female demographic.

Palm was either late or under-funded or mis-positioned or all of the above.

Essentially, Palm’s problem is not the quality of the product (which is arguable) but their ability to market and distribute in a highly competitive market. In other words, it’s not that they’re not smart enough, but that they’re not strong enough.

Sadly, it’s not enough to be smart or good. They’re in the wrong market if they think having a clever product is a winning strategy. Mobile Computing is the toughest technology market today. Because the stakes are so huge, it’s a market that is targeted by enormous resources. This is no place for start-ups.

Smart phones sold to retail customers totaled 408,000 units, down 15% from a year earlier and 29% sequentially

By some estimates, Apple pre-sold more iPads online in one week than Palm sold smartphones through Sprint and Verizon stores in 3 months. What’s more remarkable is that year-on-year decline implies Palm sold more Windows Mobile devices than WebOS which was not on the market a year ago.